How to Create a Priorities Map

Understanding the priorities for colleagues can be vital to your success. A priorities map reveals the network of priorities for people in your organization. Often, team members confuse a lack of understanding with a difference in priorities. For example, the CEO may have very different priorities than the VP of Human Resources. To help you understand these differences, consider creating priority map for your organization. Here’s how:

A Spheres of Service Priorities Map can reveal a lot about your organization

1. Pick Your Tool

If this is your first time building such a map, use paper or a dry-erase board. However, if you’re looking to build a comprehensive map for distribution, I suggest Powerpoint / Keynote. Visio or a similar flowchart program is even better.

2. Establish Boundaries

If you include all potential stakeholders, you may be there a while. For your first time, I suggest limiting the priorities to the shared stakeholders of your organization. This can include consumers, investors / sponsors or donors.

3. Center Shared Stakeholders

List common stakeholders in the middle. In business, this will typically include employees, customers and investors. Chances are this is too broad though, and you will need to break these out into specific groups. For example, Accounting, Finance and Information Technology teams.

4. Establish Weighted Connectors for Priorities

As you connect each stakeholder to yourself and other parties, mark the relationships according to the order of priority. In the demonstration here, I use the heaviest weighting and a bright red color for Priority 1. A lighter weight, blue color signifies priority 2 and the lightest weight, yellow color is priority 3. To start, keep your priorities to the top 3.

Connect each stakeholder with the proper priority weighting. When finished, you should see a visual display of the order in which you serve different stakeholders. Now, frame your challenge according to these priorities.

6. Consider Reality of Self-Service Priorities

Be careful with this one. However, if the picture is not more complete when the map is finished, consider if your map reflects reality. Is there a chance your colleague seeks to serve himself/herself first?

7. Assessment Questions

When you’re done mapping, here are some key points to consider:

1. Where are you aligned on priorities?

2. Where are you farthest apart on priorities?

3. How can you come closer together on priorities?

If you’ve done a comprehensive map:

1. Which stakeholders have the greatest number of high priority connectors? Are these teams getting most of the resources?

2. Which stakeholders have the greatest number of low priority connectors? Are these teams getting too few resources?

After you’ve done a couple one-to-one maps, try bringing them together to form a more complete picture of your organization. What would the executive committee priorities of service look like for your company? Does this reflect the gaps in support you see within different teams? By taking the time to map out these priorities you create a constructive perspective of the realities in your operating relationship.

Question: Does a priority map reveal any surprises about your organization?[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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Ben Lichtenwalner is the founder ModernServantLeader.com - the leading blog on servant leadership and top 35 site for any leadership topic, globally. Ben also speaks and consults on IT and management topics for a large variety of clients. Find out more about him at https://ModernServantLeader.com.

5 Comments

Interesting idea – How involved should you get the team involved in developing this priorities map? Have you ever tried to give everyone the task and see where they view the priorities of each team member?

Good question Ryan-Allen. I’ve not used this as a team exercise yet. However, I could see it being a great team-building exercise. Perhaps having each draft their own and then assign someone to compile them for a team review of the full picture? Let me know if you try this out.

Once you start the process you may be suprised how your team members had differing priorities than you thought. The process seems interesting and useful. It will be interesting to see how well it works.